Ideas for Pidgin, Finch, and libpurple GSoC projects

These ideas are starting points for Google Summer of Code projects that the Pidgin, Finch, and libpurple community has agreed are generally desirable and high impact. For smaller projects, community-submitted ideas, or projects that for some reason we are not sure are in scope for SoC, please see SoCAndBountyIdeas. (You can submit SoC proposals with those ideas, or your own ideas, as well, you just have to convince us they're suitable!)

Protocol-specific ideas

Encryption for XMPP

libpurple supports no native end-to-end encryption over XMPP. There are several XEPs for this, and there is absolutely room for a new protocol that is better/easier/more secure/whatever than the existing proposals. See EndToEndXMPPCrypto and talk to Ethan Blanton. Note that designing a new protocol would absolutely require getting some crypto gurus on board!

Forward Progress

Update more things to the Modern Way

We are replacing as many parts of libpurple and Pidgin with modern library-provided functionality as feasible for 3.0. For example, we have ripped out our custom DNS infrastructure and replaced it with GIO DNS that did not exist when our infrastructure was written. There's still a lot left to do here. For example, we do not use the Gtk+ icon infrastructure everywhere. Talk to mmcc about some things he identified during his 2015 Maintenance Hero project (mmcco).